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ART GUIDE

A selective listing by critics of The Times of new or noteworthy art, design and photography exhibitions at New York museums and art galleries this weekend. Addresses, unless otherwise noted, are in Manhattan. Most galleries are closed on Sundays and Mondays, but hours vary and should be checked by telephone. Gallery admission is free. * denotes a highly recommended show.

Museums

''AGAINST THE MODERN: DAGNAN-BOUVERET AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE ACADEMIC TRADITION,'' National Academy of Design Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 369-4880 (through Dec. 8). The academically trained French painter Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret was internationally celebrated in the last two decades of the 19th century. He secretly used photography to achieve a vivid realism that was most convincingly realized in a series of paintings devoted to religious customs of peasant folk in Brittany. After 1900 he made pseudo-Renaissance Christian pictures, and when he died in 1929, few remembered him. In the catalog essay, the show's curator, Gabriel P. Weisberg, makes a fascinating story out of this career, shedding much light on the development of early Modernism. Hours: Wednesdays and Thursdays, noon to 5 p.m.; Fridays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission $8; $4.50 for students and 65+ (Ken Johnson).

''AMERICAN ANTHEM: MASTERWORKS FROM THE AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM,'' 45 West 53rd Street, (212) 265-1040 (through Jan. 5). The last of three shows celebrating the American Folk Art Museum's new building, ''Anthem'' displays more than 250 objects in the museum's collection, and in the cleverly designed new digs the show really comes on strong. It displays some of folk art's most esteemed icons, among them the ''Flag Gate,'' a weathered farm gate of painted wood in the shape of an American flag; a pair of spiffy lady-and-gentleman portraits by Ammi Phillips; a spirited carousel horse from Coney Island carved by Charles Carmel; and a life-size baseball player at bat, carved by Samuel Anderson Robb. For the first time the show includes the work of 20th-century self-taught artists in context with earlier folk art in the collection. Also for the first time the museum demonstrates its recently expanded collecting interests beyond the United States, showing the work of 20th-century self-taught Europeans like Adolf Wolfli, Madge Gill and Carlo Zinelli. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission: $9; $5 for students and 62+ (Grace Glueck)

JUDY CHICAGO: ''THE DINNER PARTY,'' Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000 (through Feb. 9). This exhibition welcomes back Ms. Chicago's extravagant installation banquet of ceramic plates and handmade table runners dedicated to 39 women. This feminist landmark is joining its permanent collection 22 years after its first appearance at the museum. It is amazing to see. Made with the help of hundreds of volunteers from 1975 to 1979, ''The Dinner Party'' sums up the first stage of feminist art, reflects the late 70's rematerialization of the art object and is startlingly prescient of the art of the late 80's and 90's in its ambition to be both aggressively visual and politically charged. Despite being almost as much a part of American culture as Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, W.P.A. murals and the AIDS quilt, it still retains much of its original revolutionary fervor. Hours and admissions: Hours: Wednesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (until 11 p.m. the first Saturday of each month). Admission: $6; $3 for students and 62+ (Roberta Smith).

* ''CULTIVATED LANDSCAPES: REFLECTIONS OF NATURE IN CHINESE PAINTING WITH SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION OF MARIE-HÉLÈNE AND GUY WEILL,'' Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212) 535-7710 (through Feb. 9). This show is basically a rotation of the permanent collection, of the kind required to protect light-sensitive silk scrolls and ink-painted album pages. But the Met has a flair for turning necessity into a virtue by reintroducing work along thematic lines and introducing fresh material to lend a sense of event. Such is the case here. At the center of the reinstallation is a group of splendid Ming and Qing dynasty paintings recently given or promised to the museum by the New York collectors Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill. They are a genuine attraction in themselves and a logical link in the continuum that this museum's remarkable Chinese holdings span from beginning to end. Hours: Sundays and Tuesdays through Thursdays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays until 9 p.m. Admission: $12; $7 for students and 65+ (Holland Cotter).

* EXPOSED: THE VICTORIAN NUDE, Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000 (through Jan. 5). For the latest overview of British naughtiness, you may once again go to (where else?) Brooklyn, for this show of not very prudish Victorian art. ''Exposed'' has even more naked women without their pubic hair than the last Vanessa Beecroft show at the Gagosian Gallery. The naked young maidens here, shackled to a rock or draped over the oars of a ship (the boatmen bravely stare straight ahead) or riding horses or just standing there with an anaconda wrapped around their bodies are Andromeda, the Sirens, Godiva and Harmonia. The artists include Sargent, Frederic Leighton and Herbert Schmalz, whose ''Faithful Unto Death'' presents half a dozen or so naked damsels, loosely bound to herms, awaiting lions in the Circus Maximus. Lawrence Alma-Tadema imagines apple-flushed Victorian women soaking in a Roman plunge bath. Fortunately, the show does not stint on genuine porn. Perfume and underwear advertisers today clearly have nothing on the feisty Victorians. The show ends with works by Walter Sickert and Gwen John, artists at the turn of the last century who dispensed with the kinky fantasies of antigravitational breasts and painted what they really saw. Hours and admissions: See above (Michael Kimmelman)

* ''FACING THE MASK'' and ''RECENT ACQUISITIONS: SELECTIONS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION,'' Museum for African Art, third floor, 36-01 43rd Avenue, Long Island City, (718) 784-7700 (through March 3). The Museum for African Art, formerly of SoHo, makes the leap to a new home in Long Island City, Queens, with a very beautiful if surveyish show titled ''Facing the Mask,'' which happens to be all about moving. Some of the moving is physical, some psychological and spiritual, and it is embodied in more than 70 stunning masks, no two alike, from across sub-Saharan Africa. Some were used for popular entertainment; others were moral forces incarnate. Their purpose was transport, and they are supplemented here by films of masquerades in action. Also on view is a selection of work from the museum's still small but growing permanent collection. Hours: Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 to 6 p.m. Admission: $5; $2.50 for students and seniors (Cotter).

''MOVING PICTURES,'' Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 88th Street, (212) 423-3500 (through Jan. 12). This survey of photography with a small selection of video, film and installation art appended may be the largest exhibition of its kind in a major New York museum. Drawn almost entirely from the Guggenheim's permanent collection, it has a snappy yet unobtrusive design by Hani Rashid and ably surveys the expansion of contemporary art by camera-dependent media from the late 1960's to now. It begins with works by Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, then moves up the museum's ramp through photographs by Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky, concluding with video and film by artists like Stan Douglas, Shirin Neshat and Pierre Huyghe. An added attraction is the foam-lined, cavelike video galleries perched at the top of the spiral, which give the show a giddy, Hall of the Mountain King finale that seems to say ''onward and upward with video.'' Hours: Sundays through Wednesdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission: $12; $9 for students and 65+ (Smith)

* ''POUSSIN, CLAUDE AND THEIR WORLD: 17TH-CENTURY FRENCH DRAWINGS FROM THE ÉCOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS, PARIS,'' Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700 (through Dec. 1). Over the centuries the École des Beaux-Arts, the world's oldest surviving art school (founded in 1648), assembled an enormous collection of works to instruct its students in the discipline of drawing, which it considered paramount to their training. Among the holdings, those from the 17th century, the great age of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, are especially outstanding. The 71 on display here survey French drawing from 1620 to 1680, when Classicism came to French art, aiming to restore High Renaissance ideals of clarity, order and balance with the Italian painter Raphael as a revered model. The show's emphasis is on the works of Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude (1604-1682), a history painter and a landscapist respectively. But lesser-known masters like Simon Vouet, Eustache Le Sueur and Charles LeBrun are also included. Wicked doings in the Bible, sex in mythology, the ordered schematics of French architecture and the pomp and circumstance of the French court are some of the subjects covered by these drawings, which should send any aficionado to the Frick on the run. Hours and admissions: Tuesday through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 6 p.m. Admission: $10; students and 62+, $5 (Glueck).

''WINOGRAND 1964,'' International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 860-1777 (through Dec. 1). In 1964, the photographer Garry Winogrand crisscrossed America in a slow, black 1957 two-door Ford Fairlaine, taking nearly 20,000 photographs along the way. Here are around 150 of them, most of them never shown before. Some are not terrific. Winogrand was a hit-and-miss artist, and the show could have been edited. But others are great, and together they make a fresh, divinely eccentric portrait of America after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The resonance with 9/11, though obvious, goes unstated. A poor skeptic, Winogrand clearly saw the fragility and the preciousness of what binds people together. Many of the pictures seem fragile, too: they're fleeting stories sometimes so provisional as to be barely coherent, irreducible, like life, to a simple message. They record the effects of new places -- airports, malls, suburbia -- that Winogrand recognized before other photographers, along with the peculiar new rituals they inspired. In Portland, Ore., he found a shopping mall with a skating rink in it; he updated Norman Rockwell by shooting a towheaded boy in a striped shirt standing in the striped shadow of the awning at a Sandy's Jr. drive-up window. And at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, in front of the Book Depository (a famous picture), he focused on the oglers with their postcards and cameras, avoiding whatever might smack of platitudes or ritual mourning. It's a dark-humored image, typical of Winogrand, almost too good to be true but not cruel or without heart. Winogrand captured how America once again transformed catastrophe into commerce, an inevitable but also strangely redemptive process. Hours and admission: Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: $9; $6, students and 62+ (Kimmelman).

Galleries: 57th Street

TOLAND GRINNELL, ''A Mobile Home and Other Necessities,'' Mary Boone Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street, (212) 752-2929 (through Oct. 19). The artist goes to even greater lengths than usual to state the obvious, handmaking a 31-piece suite of luggage that has all the comforts of the most luxurious Upper East Side co-op apartment to remind us that we live in an era of material excess. The works have an empty-headed muscle-bound perfection in which message is overwhelmed by medium. But the impeccable pale yellow caning with forest green leather trim should be optioned by Vuitton or Hermès pronto (Smith).

* ''THE HEAVENLY TREE GROWS DOWNWARD: SELECTED WORKS BY HARRY SMITH, PHILIP TAAFFE AND FRED TOMASELLI,'' James Cohan Gallery, 41 West 57th Street, (212) 755-7171 (through Oct. 19). Harry Smith (1923-1991) is best known for his archival recording project ''Anthology of American Folk Music.'' But he was also a filmmaker and an inventive painter. Some of his paintings and early films are shown here, and they reflect his many interests, from alchemy and psychoactive drugs to jazz and modernist art. He is joined in this show by two fine contemporary painters, Philip Taaffe and Fred Tomaselli, who admire his work and, in different ways, share his sensibility. Mr. Taaffe's contribution adds up to a laboratory of new ideas; Mr. Tomaselli shows some of his best collage-paintings to date (Cotter).

SOL LEWITT, ''New Wall Drawings,'' PaceWildenstein Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, (212)421-3292 (through Oct. 12). For Mr. LeWitt, a white wall is a challenge, like a bare stage to a choreographer. At PaceWildenstein he has attacked the pristine walls with bold onslaughts of color, orchestrating red, yellow, blue, purple, orange and green into six continuous geometric drawings that form a spectacular color environment. The most dazzling runs more than 58 feet and is 12 feet high. It consists of bars of different lengths and colors played off against each other lengthwise, crosswise and diagonally on a ground of vivid red. A contrapuntal romp (Glueck).

ALIX PEARLSTEIN, ''Episode,'' Artemis Greenberg Van Doren, 730 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street, (212) 445-0444 (through Oct. 5). The basic tensions of family life are the subject of a breakthrough video installation, enacted with comic flair yet emotional accuracy by four able actors who never say a word. With the help of a constantly roving, tilting camera and all-white background, the work has a loopy spatial quality that can even set in motion the viewer who wants to keep up with the action, which is projected on opposite walls (Smith).

Galleries: Chelsea

WILL COTTON, Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, (212) 752-2929 (through Oct. 19). With a dry, thin touch, Mr. Cotton continues to paint giant images of supersweet deserts like flans in a lake of syrup that are more repulsive than mouth-watering. His project might be a comment on a culture of instantaneous gratification. Now he has added to the mix nubile young women, naked or in underwear. Dusted with sugar, drenched in chocolate or smeared with frosting, these misty dream girls loll about in hypoglycemic dazes (Johnson).

ANN CRAVEN, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Inc., 524 West 19th Street, (212) 807-9494 (throuh Oct. 5). At first glance you might think Ann Craven's paintings take off rather prettily on real creatures. But no, these deer and birds are fakey simulacra, the kinds of wildlife found on greeting cards and kitschy calendars. The deer, or dear, as Ms. Craven prefers to call them, pose fetchingly in green grass; the birds, of mixed ancestry and shrill plumage, perch on branches against blurry floral backgrounds. But this sprightly, deliberately slick artificial aviary goes on too long. After all, there isn't much new in the story of kitsch befouling nature (Glueck).

ROWENA DRING, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 545 West 20th Street, (212) 924-7545 (through Oct. 5). This young, Amsterdam-based Englishwoman makes Pop-style, photo-based landscapes by a surprising technique. Using a sewing machine and black thread, Ms. Dring produces her pictures by stitching countless pieces of colored fabric to stretched canvases. The effect is more impressive the bigger the size, as in a picture of a forest waterfall that measures 7 by 10 feet. In its expansive, percussive luminosity, it is like a Tiffany stained-glass window (Johnson).

FERUS, Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 741-1111 (through Oct. 19). A tribute to the life, times and art of Ferus, the far-sighted gallery that was arguably the point of origin of the Los Angeles art scene but that also reflected its artistic moment -- the fertile decade from 1957 to 1967 -- as fully as any New York gallery. Major works by Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and Jay DeFeo and others make the show a museum-caliber treat (Smith).

* MICHAEL HURSON, Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, (212) 255-1155 (through Oct. 12). At the heart of this show are seven drawings done from a reproduction of Seurat's painting ''Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.'' They reiterate the painting's gliding figures and majestic recession of space, while replacing its seamless surface with the quirky, slightly anxious, multitextured intimacy that Mr. Hurson has developed over the years and puts to excellent use here (Smith).

MIKI LEE, Lyons Wier Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, (212) 242-6220 (through Oct. 5). It's hard to go wrong with stripes. Miki Lee fills medium-size canvases with carefully painted wiggly stripes in saturated colors. Each contains scores of stripes, no two of which are exactly the same hue. There's nothing deep or surprising about these paintings, but they are easy on the eyes (Johnson).

* ROBERT MELEE, ''You Me and Her,'' Andrew Kreps Gallery, 516 West 20th Street, (212) 741-8849 (through Oct. 5). Picasso had his wives and lovers. William Wegman has his Weimaraners. Robert Melee has his mother. She is the muse of his current show and, as always, an arresting presence: past middle age, partial to Phyllis Diller wigs, Alice Cooper eyeliner and alcohol, she is the subject of photographs and videos notable for their mingling of affection and aggression. They exist in some transcendantly abject universe where inhibitions and animosities fall where they may, where perversity is pleasure and decay a kind of innocence. You may not want to live there, but you won't forget your visit in a hurry (Cotter).

JOAN MITCHELL, HORACE BRISTOL, Robert Miller Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, (212) 366-4774 (through Oct. 12). A selection of works from four decades by the estimable Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell includes some especially fine, sensuously gnarly examples from the late 1950's and early 60's. Bristol, an early Life magazine staff photographer, made photographs for the Navy in the 1940's. His clean, romantic, sepia images of planes parked on aircraft carriers or flying in formation and group portraits of sailors on and off the job look more like film stills than journalistic documents. They have an odd resonance now in a time of war anxiety and patriotic agitation (Johnson).

YOSHIYUKI MIURA, Von Lintel Gallery, 555 West 25th Street, (212) 242-0599 (through Oct. 12). Using industrial materials, Mr. Miura makes sculptures as visually gripping as they are physically seductive. The centerpiece here is a circular work consisting of hundreds of vertical steel rods, each with a golden bronze tip, which grow taller as they progress concentrically from the center. The geometric order gives way to shifting, optically pulsating patterns of radiating, glinting gold dots and vibrating black verticals (Johnson).

SCOTT RICHTER, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, (212) 463-9666, (through Oct. 15). Scott Richter piles up pigment on tables or wall plaques in luscious, thick, gooey layers that make the viewer long for a lick. The works need no other justification for their existence than the pure pleasure of paint, yet they do have references, to Pop Art, to Minimalism, to the Hudson River School, to the palettes of different painters admired by Mr. Richter, even to world events. The pièce de résistance is a table, ''Big Sky,'' dedicated to Frederic E. Church. It celebrates the romantic tints of the Hudson River School, whose canvases made the American wilderness into gorgeous stage sets. A smooth, shiny, hardened wall of paint sweeps up from the back edge of the table, its nuanced sunset colors shimmering over a flat yellowish-orange ground that ends at the table's front edge in thick encrustations and gobbets of paint. In evokes those sublime landscapes, yet gives new dimensions to paint as its own subject (Glueck).

KARL JENSEN, ''Pulpit,'' Five Myles, 558 St. Johns Place, Crown Heights, (718) 783-4438 (through Oct. 6). If the Hell's Angels had a church, their pulpit might look something like Mr. Jensen's spin on ecclesiastical design, which you might call heavy-metal Rococo. With enough ceiling height, his nonfunctional pulpit made of ingeniously cut-up and bolted-together sheets of steel would soar 25 feet. Here it's divided into two parts, focusing on its ingenious systematic construction and semiotic details, including commercial plaques, dangling monkeys and the six two-headed concrete turtles that the whole thing stands on (Johnson).

* MATT MARELLO, ''The Pollock Project,'' Pierogi, 177 North Ninth Street, Williamsburg, (718) 599-2144 (through Oct. 7). This wry yet mythically resonant meditation on the cult of the Dionysian artist features video projections in which the artist has digitally inserted himself into clips of Jackson Pollock painting, the Led Zepplin percussionist John Bonham drumming and the action-movie star Bruce Lee performing with nunchakus. A fourth shows the view from a car driving at night. Actual drumsticks, nunchaku sticks and a paintbrush, all carved from wood found near the site of Pollock's fatal car crash, are displayed in a vitrine like sacred relics (Johnson).

''YOU'RE JUST A SUMMER LOVE, BUT I'LL REMEMBER YOU WHEN WINTER COMES,'' Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, 97 North Ninth Street, Williamsburg, (718) 782-4100 (through Oct. 6). The young artists in this larky group exhibition share a downtown sensibility (rooted in this case in Manhattan's Lower East Side); various kinds of friendships; and an anarchic, school's-out-forever aesthetic, which might be described as a post-punk-hippie-grunge hybrid. A retro-60's strain is played out in stained-glass sculptures and painted rainbows. A video by Kid America has the streetwise visual snap of graffiti and the frantic pacing of a television commercial. The art world may be fixated on Well-Made Objects these days, but a high, here-today communal energy is the story here (Cotter).

MIMI GROSS, ''Charm of the Many,'' Salander O'Reilly Galleries, 20 East 79th Street, (212) 879-6606 (through tomorrow). A painter, sculptor and installation artist as well as a costume and set designer, Ms. Gross has also made likenesses of family, friends, other art worldlings and such. Aside from her refreshingly unslick talent for drawing and modeling with pigment, she has an evocative way of catching her subjects as if they had paused in a conversation with her. What she has done is to make a continuing catalog of the faces that capture her interest, and every face she meets apparently does, to the viewer's pleasure (Glueck).

JENNY HOLZER, ''Protect Me From What I Want,'' Printed Matter, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 925-0325 (through Monday). Ms. Holzer's blunt, insistent sound bites have been buzzing through the collective culture since the early 1980's, conveyed on baseball hats, T-shirts, foam plastic cups and bumper stickers, as well as with nylon stockings and china. This survey thoroughly samples these ephemeral efforts and celebrates her distinctive way with words, filling the premises with Holzer-babble. Its subversive consciousness-raising and sense of apocalyptic foreboding seems freshly pertinent (Smith).

* ''THE PAINTINGS OF JOAN MITCHELL,'' Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3676 (through Sunday). The impact of Mitchell's works, especially the later ones (she died of lung cancer 10 years ago, at 66), is so immediately intoxicating that a natural reaction is to distrust the art. Distrust your distrust. Lush, opulent fields of color, seemingly all paradisiacal, contain shades of melancholy that reveal themselves to you after your eyes adjust to their light. Mitchell absorbed the influences of Pollock, Gorky, Kline and de Kooning. There are ferocious paintings of clotted splatters in the 1950's. Then hovering shapes appear in muted green, gray and blue in the 60's. They give way by the early 70's to more vividly colored multipanel paintings in which increasing varieties of shapes and lines jostle. Mitchell's last works, from the 80's and early 90's, push Monet into the late-20th century ecstatically. Hours: Tuesdays through Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 1 to 9 p.m. Admission: $12; $9.50 for students and 62+ (Kimmelman).